


Definitely Not Homecoming

by templemarker



Category: Selfie (TV), Superstore (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-10-13
Packaged: 2019-01-16 18:25:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12348141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/templemarker/pseuds/templemarker





	Definitely Not Homecoming

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Diaphenia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diaphenia/gifts).



"Omigod, _Jonah_?" came a high-pitched yell from halfway across electronics. Jonah, in the middle of stacking boxes of Borax on the endcap of Aisle 34, closed his eyes, hard, hands frozen on the image of a a Twenty Mule Team.

Reluctantly, he slowly spun on the heel of his right foot, and Eliza Dooley stood before him in five-inch heels. Her corona of perfectly coiffed hair was like the red warning beacon on every video game he had ever played.

" _Omigod_ , it is you! Jonah Simms, what are you wearing?" Eliza stalked towards him like the fiercest lioness, and Jonah resisted the urge to step backwards and hide behind the fake ferns on sale for 20% off.

"Eliza," he said, clearing his throat as it had mysteriously dried. "You're...in St. Louis. Why are you in in St. Lous."

"Duh, didn't you see my Insta? I know you follow me, Jonah, jsimms91 is a totally obvious username. The National Phamarceutical Sales Association conference is here, and, like, I needed some gummy worms stat to deal with all that drama. Also I forgot my deodorant. So."

"Right. Yeah, I didn't check Instagram this week. I just didn't expect to see you...here." Jonah darts his eyes around, trying to make sure that none of his co-workers are nearby, but definitely one thousand percent making sure that Amy doesn't catch this. Myrtle is the next aisle over, ostensibly removing the paprikas one by one off the shelf to clean them from a paprika explosion an hour ago; Cheyenne is re-organizing the stuffed animals on the summer seasonal storefront, but it seems more like she's having a tea party than stocking. No Amy in sight. 

When he turns to look back at Eliza, she has a weird look on her face, and he runs back the last thing he said. Eliza was always on the new thing when they were in college together, Twitter and Foursquare and Facebook. She's probably apalled that he isn't slavishly devoted to social media all the time. These days, he can go a week without looking at his phone. It's better than seeing all the things his B-School people are up to, or fielding the latest email from his dad about jobs he could be doing with his college education.   
She surprises him, though, when she says, "Yeah. I've been---I've dialled a lot of it back. Instagram is kind of the only thing I post to these days. Well, publicly. I dropped my Twitter, and my Facebook went private after I cut my friendslist down to people I actually knew IRL."

"Wow," Jonah says. He's not sure what exactly to comment on, that she stopped desperately chasing after the likes or that she was being so straightforward without any of the reality tv intonation she ruthlessly stuck to. "That's, uh. That's cool. Listen, let me show you where the deodorant is."

Checking both ways and still, thankfully, not seeing Amy, Jonah walks Eliza to Aisle 12A. She walks beside him, almost outpacing him with her long legs despite her gravity-defying heels. She feels different. Not as manic as she was when they were in college together. That's what happens, people change, he figures. He doesn't want to look that closely at how he's changed since graduating, almost five years ago now. 

"So you work here, huh?" Eliza says, but quietly, like she knows it might make him feel uncomfortable and has the social skills to be careful about asking. 

"Yep," Jonah says, trying not to strain his voice with false cheer. He's not ashamed of working at Cloud 9. Whatever Amy thinks of him, he doesn't think he's slumming it, or taking a gap year, or doing some Thoreau thing, making it out in the wilds as if to prove something to himself. "I, uh, I left B-School a little over a year ago, and this Cloud 9 was hiring. You know my parents live in Kirkwood, just outside the city, and a friend from high school needed a subletter, so. It wasn't exactly planned, but it worked out pretty well."

Eliza nods. "I thought about B School for a hot minute, but my sales were so high at KinderKare that I was promoted, so it didn't make sense. I didn't want to do management or whatever. Sales works for me."

"That's great," Jonah says. "I mean, that it works for you. B-School wasn't exactly what I thought it would be." A woman's cart blocks the main thoroughfare as she runs around, trying to grab the things her toddler is chucking out of the cart. This is the longest trip to Health & Beauty he's ever made. Eliza stops at the display of Bertolli Pasta, kind of nicely framed by the ad's glow surrounding the boxes on the cardboard. 

"Listen," Eliza said. "It's like really random that I ran into you, like some weird fate thing or whatever. Of all the Cloud 9's in all the world, like that movie with the old guy and the hot British lady. My Hen--my fri--my person showed it to me the other day, it was kind of boring but I totally got it. Anyway, I saw you and I just--I wanted to thank you."

She gives him a kind of trembly smile, and Jonah's eyes widen in response. What does she have to thank him for? They spent three years on the Debate Team together, partnered for two of them because the coach privately took him aside and asked him to partner with her. Jonah never found her that annoying: she seemed vapid until she was destroying their opponent on matters of evidentiary policy, and they won several times. They didn't hang out beyond Debate, but they weren't strangers, either. Too many road trips in a 12 passenger van, and exhausting days from 7 AM to 9 PM running around a competitor's college campus on Saturdays make for close company whether you're inclined to hang out or not. 

"Oh--uh, you're welcome, I guess, but what for? You were a great partner on Debate. I still remember how you crushed that State College team by pointing out their wrongly attributed quote. It was a good time."  
Out of the corner of his eye, Jonah catches a blue vest with brown-blonde hair hovering over a familiar shoulder, and he tugs Eliza into the pasta and sauces aisle, as if to move them past the obstructing cart, which seems to be more empty than when it first started. 

"Jonah," Eliza says, catching his arm. Her smile is a little more firm. "I know Coach Blake asked you to partner with me. No one else would. I would have had to spend the year as an alternate, subbing in if someone was sick. You were such a nice guy, stepping up, even though you knew I was a handful by that point. It meant a lot, that someone was willing to just, you know, see me for me and not hate me for it. I didn't--I don't make friends easily. I mean, real friends. Not followers or whatever, I was a boss at followers. So you were a friend to me, even if you didn't really mean to be. You were a friend by being willing to step up." She squeezes his arm, a little close like she wants to pull him into a hug, and of course that's when Amy finds him. 

"Jonah, what are you doing? You left the endcap half finished and Mateo is freaking out about symmetry or something--oh hi." Amy visibly stops short when she realizes he's with someone, with a _customer_ , and her eyes narrow as she takes in the scene and reads it completely, totally wrong. 

Amy looks at Eliza's hand on Jonah's arm, the way Jonah isn't trying to step out of the physical intimacy, and she pastes her "minimum customer service" smile on her face before saying, "Is Jonah helping you find everything okay?"

"Amy, this is--" Jonah stumbles out, but Eliza talks over him, still practiced at dominating a conversation. 

"He is, but we're old friends. We went to college together! Just catching up." Eliza smiles brightly at Amy, nearly twice as tall as Amy yet somehow not looming over her. "It's always nice to catch up with your college buddies, you know?"

No one who hadn't spent an inordinate amount of paid hourly time starting inadvertedly at all the expressions of Amy's face would catch the flicker of bitterness chasing across Amy's eyes as the comment unintentionally lands hard. But Jonah sees it for what it is, regret and shame and guilt and envy all rolled up into a flash of lightning across the eyes. Jonah almost winces in sympathy, but he knows she would just take it harder if she knew that he saw her emotions.   
"Of course," Amy says, no insincerety in her voice but still retaining that awful chipperness reserved for dealing with certain customers, particularly the ones she thinks Jonah is hitting on. "Well, I'd be happy to take you to the deodorant, Jonah really needs to get back to the endcap display--"

"Eliza," comes a man's voice, as he steps into the aisle next to Amy. "Where have you been?" The man's eyes take in the scene, Amy's Customer Stance, Jonah's bewilderment, Eliza's hand now tucked into the pocket of her trench coat. 

"Henry," Eliza says warmly, and Jonah can unfortunately remember the string of idiot boyfriends Eliza had the shitty taste to date, but none of them were anything like this guy. His suit is so crisp it almost waters Jonah's eyes, nearly severe--apart for the pocket square, which happens to coordinate perfectly with the color visible at the hem of Eliza's dress. 

"I have your deodorant," Henry says, clearly a bit uncomfortable talking in front of strangers, "and--"

"And my gummy worms?" Eliza asks eagerly. 

"--your gummy worms," Henry finishes, holding up a bag of Super Cloud Premium Gummy Worms (With Added Fruit Juice!). 

In two strides, Eliza has crossed over to Henry, standing several inches taller than him due to her heels, They seem to be used to it, as she tucks her hand in his elbow and Henry gracefully re-arranges the items in his basket to accomodate her. 

"We should go if we're going to make the--" Henry says, and Eliza interrupts, saying "Yes, yes, the keynote, I know. We can go now. Jonah," she says, turning her attention back to him for a moment. "It was great to see you. Don't be a stranger on Instagram."

At the term "Instagram," Henry gets a funny half-indulgent half-constipated look on his face, and if Jonah hadn't already been pretty sure they were together, that look confirmed it. He had to be pretty into Eliza to put up with her whole social media thing. Then again, she did say she changed how she dealt with it...

"Nice to see you, Eliza. Hope the conference goes well," Jonah says, and with friendly waves off go Eliza and her Henry to checkout. They are very pretty together. Jonah feels a little intimidated. 

"Another one of your B-School buddies?" Amy asks, her voice agressively neutral even as she makes verbal air quotes around "B-School."

"Nah," Jonah says, turning to look at Amy, who looks away immediately as if she wasn't looking at him at all. "We were partners on Debate Team my junior and senior years. I haven't seen her since we graduated. She moved to New York the moment her cap and gown were off."

"Oh." Amy doesn't follow up with anything, no pithy remark, and that's how Jonah knows she feels unsettled by the reminder that Jonah has lead a very different life from hers in all the time before they ended up working together. 

Risking her wrath, Jonah bumps his shoulder against hers, and says, "Did you see that kid throw those salad tongs? She got them almost to the plastic food storage. Kid's got an arm on her, she'll be a pitcher for sure."

Amy snorts, and gave him a half-smile for his efforts. "Your Borax awaits you," she says. "If you get it done by your break, I may or may not have brought cookies left over from Emma's bake sale."

Jonah grins at her, gives her a half salute. "I'll grab one of the last-day milks," he says. "It's a--" He catches himself before he says "date," and covers his stumble by winging backwards into the metal edge of the aisle. "Ow!"

Amy just rolls her eyes, consults her clipboard again, and walks away. 

Jonah's grin doesn't fade for the rest of his shift.


End file.
